This invention relates to heat molded garments, as well as to a method and apparatus for the manufacture of such garments, using the combination of heat molding techniques and ultra sound bonding techniques.
Historically, the garment manufacturing industry has utilized well known cut-and-sew procedures in the manufacture and production of garments. Typically, a pattern is created and fabric material is cut in accordance with the garment pattern. The various sections cut are then sewn together to form the particular garment.
Clothing production is an extremely labor intensive process. There are approximately forty separate steps involved in the manufacture of a single garment, such as a dress. Although there has been a significant modernization of the individual steps involved in garment manufacture, it still remains basically the same cut-and-sew operation that has been in existence for over a hundred years. Even with the introduction of newly developed laser cutting and automatic sewing machines, the manufacture of the garment still requires much hand manipulation of the fabric. Not only does this make the process highly labor intensive, but also causes many quality control problems because of the impossibility of achieving precise replication of manual manipulations.
An additional problem with the existing cutting and sewing techniques is that the resulting garment is one that is substantially two dimensional. Beginning from a pattern and cutting designs and sections and ultimately piecing them together results only in a flat garment having front and back portions. Since the garment is to be worn by a three dimensional human form, numerous techniques have been introduced to permit the two dimensional fabric to achieve a proper shape on the human form. Darts, ruffles, pleats, and similar gathering of material is formed at various portions of the fabric design in order to simulate a three dimensional form.
Nevertheless, because of the standard techniques, great imposition is placed upon designers who must restrict their capabilities to two dimensional patterns. In addition, the garments themselves frequently do not lie properly on the human form and unsightly bulges appear, or sections may stretch greater than their capabilities.
In order to permit actual three dimensional formation of garments, various techniques have been introduced in the past. For example, after the introduction of knitted fabics, the inclusion of additional stitches in the fabric design permitted a three dimensional shape in such knitted garments. Utilizing complex knitting machines, such additional stitching could be achieved. However, this approach was limited to knitted fabrics and also required extremely complicated design and control of the knitting machines.
A more recent development is the ability to actually mold garments into three dimensional form. Although garment molding machines were introduced in the early 1900's, they were not utilized to great extents until the invention of appropriate fabrics which accommodate thermo-setting techniques. The introduction of man made fibers and synthetic thermoplastic continuous yarn such as nylon or polyesters, gave greater feasibility to the molding of garments. However the capabilities were little utilized in garment production. The use of such molding techniques has generally been limited to the formation of specialized items such as brassieres and bra cups for swimwear, and the like. By way of example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,077,196 was one of the first to introduce a one piece molded plastic brassiere fitted with a non molded elastic band on the back. Likewise, "seamless" garments were also introduced utilizing molding techniques. In fact, in many cases the "seamless" bra has become the common terminology of molded brassiere cups.
Little, however, was done to utilize the molding technique for overgarments such as dresses, shirts, and the like. Nevertheless, U.S. Pat. No. 3,819,638 did introduce a method of making molded ladies dresses from knitted fabrics. That patent, however, utilized a cylindrical fabric and stretched the fabric in its cylindrical form over a mold in order to make an appropriate tubular dress. Sleeves, and other portions were molded in tubular fashion and sewn onto the main body portion.
While certain of these molding techniques have been known and developed, they have been essentially limited to experimental use mainly because the techniques introduced failed to lend themselves to automated continuous formation of garments. Additionally, they failed to provide for the ability of simulating the production of the garment with that of standard cut and sew techniques. As a result, thus far the garment industry still depends upon the standard cut and sew methods and the use of molded garment techniques have failed to achieve inroads in the garment industry.